Each expansion I get hyped and also worried about more skills.

[Powercow]

I want them to consolidate all movement buttons into just one button. There's no reason to have all that bloat for moving left and right and forward and back when you could just have one "move to the right spot" button. Heck, if you count the diagonals that's a whopping 7 directions you can consolidate into one!

Now you might say, "but movement is an integral part of the game" to which I say, sure! Keep it! But when are you ever going to move to the wrong spot on purpose? And honestly, it should just be a toggle for those who don't want it. Personally I think not letting you move to the wrong spot just makes the game better in every conceivable way, and makes more room for other movement buttons to be added.

[Mikey_R]

Definitely can't change monk since they are not combos.

SAM just has 3 different combos, there would be no issue consolidating that to 3 buttons, one for each sen combo.

Meikyo Shisui on Samurai allows you to execute any Weapon Skill with it acting as if it was in a combo, similar to Perfect Balance. WHile this is mostly used to build sens, I do believe it is also sometimes used to refresh Jinpu and Shifu buffs, though I don't know Samurai well enough for all of its intracacies.

[Nyarlha]

Meikyo Shisui on Samurai allows you to execute any Weapon Skill with it acting as if it was in a combo, similar to Perfect Balance. WHile this is mostly used to build sens, I do believe it is also sometimes used to refresh Jinpu and Shifu buffs, though I don't know Samurai well enough for all of its intracacies.

Ah yeah I forgot about that one, been a while since I played SAM. For sen building you could imagine it'd turn your hotkeys to the last step of the combos while active, but yeah you'd have to forego fringe case such as buff refresh when MS.

[Fland]

Branching skills are always a false excuse, it's still pretty easy. Say you have a job that has 2 combos : 1 2 3 and 1 2 4. Just consolidate 1 2 3 and leave 4 separate, so that you just need to do 1 1 1 or 1 1 2(previously 4). That already cuts down hotkeys from 4 to 2. Hell, there may even be some plugins that do just that already.

As far as "reverse order", i have no ideas what you'd be talking about, do you have any exemple?

The only extremely niche thing it'd change is that you couldn't just spam 1 2 on some jobs in very specific situation (such as PLD where you could spam Fast Blade -> Riot Blade for more mana regen) and you'd have to commit to the full combo.

What if I just want to do 1-2 and then go 1-4-5? you can't do that if the 1 button already turn into 3.
Example if I just want to refresh disembowel, but not do chaos because I know the DoT won't fully tick.
So I just want to do TT -> Disembowel -> TT -> VT -> FT.
You can't do this in your case.

[Ultimatecalibur]

Dragoon has a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 that can also end up being 1, 2, 3, 5, 4. Would you suggest that become 11123 or 11132 instead

This is wrong. The Dragoon combos are 1-2-3-6-7 and 1-4-5-7-6. Effective consolidation would be to make them 1-1-1-3-4 and 1-2-2-4-3.

Monk on the other hand, not so much because of perfect balance which lets you hit any combo skill. I think SAM has something similar? So these two jobs have mechanics you'd have to strip away in order to do this.

Perfect Balance is the only thing really in the way of consolidation and that could easily be replaced by a more engaging burst mechanic. You could then have 3 buttons that change their action based on current form and revert Form shift back to its form cycling effect to consolidate the current 9 weaponskills (6 ST, 3 AoE).

Samurai would only really requires Gekko to apply the Jinpu buff and Kasha to apply the Shifu buff during Meikyo Shisui. You could then consolidate the ST combos into 3 buttons (Hakaze/Yukikaze, Jinpu/Gekko and Shifu/Kasha) and 2 AoE buttons (Fuga/Mangetsu and Oka) with Meikyo Shisui activating the final steps of the combos.

[Puremallace]

I think you are misreading what I said. I said button prune, not ability prune. There are so many abilities that are only usable while under a condition set by another ability and there are some abilities that are mutually exclusive. These could all get condensed into one button without ruining the flow.

I am also open to combos being put on one button but am a little less sure about that except in conditional combos (1-2-3 but 2 is literally only usable after 1 and 1 does not branch etc)

See I could fully agree with this but that is not what developers hear when they see these types of post and go into meetings about ability bloat. Blizzard and other developers heard remove buttons so they removed buttons instead of just making one button do multiple things.

I am 100% in support of combining abilities if it makes sense.

For some reason MMO developers across the board think MMO players only want the next flashy button with an expansion or we will turn on them somehow. Right now if you look at WoW they are 4 expansions ahead of us and the tipping point to borrowed power was 2 expansions ago.

So going by that math we are 2 expansions away from seeing if Square Enix thinks borrowed power is a good idea. My guess after watching the current flood from WoW and hated expansions they will never consider this.

Personally I hope they nuke the place in a calamity and reset us back to zero with a brand new design far more open world MMO. Keep the frivolous stuff like mounts or whatever but reset power straight back to 0.

[MagiusNecros]

If you want button prune, adopting PvP's combo system is the way to go IMO.

[Ayuhra]

So going by that math we are 2 expansions away from seeing if Square Enix thinks borrowed power is a good idea. My guess after watching the current flood from WoW and hated expansions they will never consider this.

Personally I hope they nuke the place in a calamity and reset us back to zero with a brand new design far more open world MMO. Keep the frivolous stuff like mounts or whatever but reset power straight back to 0.

Borrowed power is awful and most WoW players hate it. It ruins what could be evergreen content.

For example Battle of Dazar'alor was a great raid that we may never get to revisit again even with time walking since it was balanced around the Heart of Azeroth and Azerite Power.

....If, a few expansions from now, in FFXIV we all got reset but kept outfits, mounts, pets, titles, basically all cosmetics I would actually be okay with that. Then again I have always wanted to see this game get a new engine and better base coding.

The devs clearly have talent, it's the engine that holds them back.

[TaleraRistain]

I love the idea of combo buttons. I adore the NIN aesthetic, for instance, but I feel like I have to be an octopus to play it right. Plus I love these suggestions about SAM since that was the only thing that could sometimes trip me up when I was leveling it.

If there were multiple connected skills on one button, maybe they could add new skills to allow weaving between the button presses without breaking the combo or something for some extra oomph. Something we can't really do right now since it would break the combo. That wouldn't be pruning but instead streamlining and improving.

[Wolwosh]

I think some jobs have to few skills. I really don't get this mentality..
So many people love DNC/WHM/DRK/MCH, but I find it really boring because you have like 1 hotbar..
If we getva 321 button combo for example one day in pve i'm out, i'll find some other game that doesn't cater to babies